Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Chris Marker | Sans Soleil (Sunless)

the loss of forgetting

by Douglas Messerli

Chris
Marker (writer and director) Sans Soleil
(Sunless) / 1983

Ostensibly a documentary performed as a kind of
random travelogue—scenes were filmed in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, Paris,
and San Francisco—Chris Marker’s Sunless is
acollage of images from Japanese
films and television, stock footage, and stolen clips from films as well an
newly filmed scenes from a silent film camera as an exercise, in part, to
juxtapose behavior by playing time against place. Indeed the film opens with
two quotes, the first by Racine, “The distance between countries compensates
somewhat for the excessive closeness of time” and a quotation from T. S.
Eliot’s Ash Wednesday: “Because I
know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what
is actual only for one time / And only for one place.”

Marker’s
film, accordingly, is a kind melancholy and slightly nostalgic study of time
and memory (the title is taken from song cycle by the Russian composer Modest
Mussorgsky).

As
the film’s narrator relates the travels of fictitious cameraman Sandor Krasna,
he emphasizes what Marker obviously sees as the dilemmas of being unable to
remember:

I will have spent my life
trying to understand the function of remembering,

which is not the opposite
of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not

remember. We rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten. How can

one remember thirst.

Without memory, moreover, how can we understand
and comprehend global histories; how can we come know our fellow man? The
traveler’s method, therefore, is not explore what we think we know but the
banal aspects of life.

He liked the fragility of
those moments suspended in time. Those memories

whose only function had
been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote:

I’ve been around the world
several times and now only banality still interests

me. On this trip I’ve
tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At

dawn we’ll be in Tokyo.

The
result of this search for banality often produces fascinating information and
connections as the film focuses on the beauty of children on an Iceland road,
on the powerful women of Guinea-Bissau, and on a shrine for cats in Japan. Some
of the narrator’s comments are in fact quite profound and succeed in revealing
new layers of the disparate cultures the film explores.

At other times, however, Marker’s narrative
reminds me a bit of the often hackneyed and clichéd notions of culture that we
have seen in French theorists who talk of the entire US in terms of Los Angeles
and Las Vegas in vague overstatements that have little to do with the reality of
those places, let alone the whole country. In short, Marker’s narrator often
finds profound ideas in what might be quite meaningless to the cultures
themselves, reminding me a bit also of the late 19thand early 20th century European and
American “orientalism,” a fascination with anything that seemed different, without the ability of those
“orientalists” to put the images upon which they focused in proper context.
Marker’s film often makes large claims for the banal activities he explores.
For example, his observation of Japanese horror movies—“Japanese horror movies
have the cunning beauty of certain corpses.”—may be an absolutely legitimate
conclusion, but one would like to know how he has come to this conclusion and
where it leads. Time and again, Marker’s narrator settles of such seemingly
profound generalities without explaining their meaning or significance in the
whole.

Of
course, this also creates a kind of poetic quality to the work which brings it,
at times a evocative power. And perhaps the focus on the small acts and odd
components of a society may better help to make us remember, bringing us closer
the filmmaker’s goal of creating a “loss of forgetting.” But at times Sunless is so dark and vague, that it
becomes hard to even know where we have been, let alone to remember the place.